A rather unusual and decidedly British ceremony takes place each year in late October. The City of London pays rent to the Crown for two pieces of land, even though it no longer knows their exact locations! For the first piece of land, somewhere in Shropshire, the City pays two knives, one blunt and one sharp. For the second piece of land, 6 giant horseshoes and 61 nails are handed over.

… welcome to the largest hedge of its kind in the world – a monster yew that takes gardening staff at a country estate two whole weeks to trim. At 40ft tall and 15ft wide, groundsmen at the Bathurst Estate in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, say the 300-year-old yew hedge is the largest of its kind in the world and costs £6,000 a year to maintain. It takes a specialist two-man team at the estate two weeks – with no weekend break – to give the hedge it’s annual trim.

A man who was one half of what is believed to be the longest-married couple in the UK has died aged 110. Karam Chand, of Bradford, died on Friday after 90 years of marriage to his wife Kartari. The pair, who tied the knot in India in 1925 during the British Raj and moved to England 40 years later, have eight children and 27 grandchildren.

In 1951, a BBC outside broadcast unit in Manchester used a portable acetate disc cutter to capture three melodies played by a primeval computer. This gigantic computer filled much of the ground floor of Alan Turing’s Computing Machine Laboratory. Today, all that remains of the recording session is a 12-inch single-sided acetate disc, cut by the BBC’s technician while the computer played.

In Estonia they quite intentionally have a 230ft organ that’s played mellifluously by the sea. In Manchester they have a skyscraper that accidentally shrieks pure sonic fear into your soul whenever there’s a strong wind. Yes, as if blighting our skylines weren’t bad enough, the UK’s vertiginous glass skyscrapers are now screaming at us.